Davide / Helios

It seems like everytime I try and get back at blogging, it isn’t really working out. I vow myself to try and do that more regularly, but I definitely fail. Maybe I should take it as an opportunity to try and analyze what’s blocking me, and what’s different from the many years ago in which I was doing this almost daily. But some other time.
This premise, despite looking like it’s not relevant at all with the title of this post, is very much so.

About a year ago, a very cool guy named Wil Wheaton made a very motivating project: A life reboot . What impressed me about his journey was not the start: it’s quite easy to have good intentions, especially for the new year, but rather the intermediate points of such a journey, and, ultimately, the ending .
I really like the idea of taking a good look at yourself and assess how you are doing.

A bit more than a year ago, an unfortunate accident happened with my 1TB hard drive. If I am taking the time to tell you this story, you can already imagine what happened. And I don’t need to tell you that it was my only hard disk. No backups, sort of.

This specific hard disk was my main storage device: among many other less important things, this hard drive contained a lot of pictures, from my first steps as (amateur) photographer till a somewhat recent future. A lot of data that I deeply cared about.

This was a hard lesson and started my journey through backup solutions.

This is a short guide, more a memento for me, to explain how I did setup a failover for our postgresql DB. It actually was a lot simpler than I thought of firsthand, but like all devops stuff, you just keep shaving yaks until everything works, and it looks like magic.
I am hardly a devops guy, and even less of a database guy. So it definitely feels like magic, and there are many parts / tweakings that I completely ignore.

Since the very beginning of my online activities, slightly more than 10 years ago, I’ve always had a blog. It felt amazing that you could write a few words and hundreds, thousands of people could read it up.
You would feel like a writer, with just a few clicks.
Of course reality was very different, and basically no one wanted to read the weird stuff that a 16 year old channels through the pages of his blog, especially when there was no twitter or anything of sort, and the first posts felt more like a few random thoughts.